At the end of August, an international group of lawyers and jurists met at The New Institute in Hamburg to start work on drafting the core principles for a treaty for the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court.
This marked the latest development in a fast-growing consensus around the need for a specialised international corruption court.
In January 2023, the European parliament issued a resolution calling for the creation of an IACC. Then in April 2023, the parliament convened a workshop outlining its expansive vision for the IACC, which would have jurisdiction over acts of so-called “grand corruption” and serve to “fill the domestic accountability vacuum in kleptocratic regimes” under the supervision of the UN.
Given the function of the International Criminal Court and the existence of long-standing treaties aimed at combatting anti-corruption at an international level, the sudden pace at which demand for an IACC is intensifying might well be questioned.
Limited remit of the ICC
Established in 2002, the ICC is well-established as the permanent court with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute individuals who are accused of any of the core international crimes set out in the Rome Statute: war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression.
While the ICC remains a figurehead institution for upholding the rule of law and seeking justice for victims of crimes within its jurisdiction, the ICC does not have jurisdiction to investigate or prosecute crimes of corruption, which is estimated by the UN to cost the global economy more than $3.6tn (£3tn) each year, with many more trillions of dollars lost owing to illicit financial flows.
This is a troubling lacuna: acts of corruption often facilitate other forms of crime including terrorist activity, money laundering, cyber crime, and serious human rights offences. The IACC therefore seeks to address the deficiency in the global prosecutions of individual corruption and fill a substantial gap that is not within the jurisdictional purview of the ICC.
Grand corruption
While there is no internationally agreed definition of grand corruption, the core elements of misuse or abuse of high-level power, large-scale and/or large sums of money and harmful consequences, are at the core of this term.
Definitions used by bodies such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime focus on criminal offences listed in existing anti-corruption conventions – including bribery, embezzlement, money laundering and other corruption offences – are likely to be utilised.
It is widely believed that the ICC would not be the correct forum to try grand corruption cases, and that the current international and domestic corruption frameworks are not adequate as matters stand.
The ICC has a limited budget of $170mn, and issues concerning lack of due process, efficacy, efficiency and independence have all been levelled against the court, which has only heard 31 cases and secured 10 convictions since its inception.
Amending the Rome Statute to expand the ICC’s jurisdiction over grand corruption offences – in the unlikely event that this were to receive sufficient political support from the 123 state parties to the Rome Statute – could serve to destabilise the existing work of the court.
